One of the real challenges facing us at RevaHealth.com is how best to SEO the different sections of our website that should be targeted at specific countries, but don’t exist neatly in one subdirectory or sub-domain, or have localised (i.e. translated) content.
Two weeks ago we posted the results of our ccTLD SEO experiment, where we described our attempts to improve the rankings of some of our UK and Ireland targeted pages by redirecting them from our .com site to our .co.uk and .ie sites respectively.
Following on from a suggestion by Leo Fogarty and an article by Lisa Myers we have now implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target sections of our website to their intended audiences.
First we created /IE and /UK subfolders on the .com site. Then we made sitemaps of the sections of the site to be geo-targeted to Irish and British audiences respectively and put these into these folders. Finally we submitted these sitemaps to Google’s Webmaster Tools, making sure to geo-target each of the subfolders containing the sitemaps to their intended target countries.
Specifically, we geo-targeted the folder www.revahealth.com/IE/ to Ireland, and put the sitemap with pages we want to target to an Irish audience into that folder. We did the same for the /UK/ subfolder.
By doing this we hope to improve our rankings on Google.ie and Google.co.uk, and to increase traffic to our UK and Irish pages. Setting a geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools shouldn’t impact our pages’ positions in the search results unless the user chooses the “pages from Ireland” or “pages from the UK” option. That’s why this experiment seems less risky and shouldn’t jeopardise our positions on Google.com.
We will keep you informed if we see any positive or negative effects. Have any of you tried this or something similar in the past? Leave us a comment and let us know how it worked out for you.
[UPDATE - 16/02/2010]
We’ve finished testing this now so go have a read of the results of our geo-targeted sitemaps test.
Very interesting approach. One thing though. If I do a search on google.co.uk and not specify only pages from UK it is still ranks uk sites higher. My point being that this should have impact on normal search as well and explicitly specified regional searches. If this does what you want it to do, that is a good thing though.
.. opps, few bad typos in the comment above.
Actually it’s not just for ranking higher when you tick the “pages from the UK”, no one really ticks that anyway. It might not affect your rankings on its own but it WILL help Google realise that you are targeting the UK with one set of pages and Ireleand on another part of your site. Although saying that I normally use this for different countries where different languages are spoken, where you are more likely to see the result. i.e as Google won’t assume you are trying to target Germany when you have a section of a .com where everything else is in English, creating a sepearte XML sitemap for the /de pages will then help point Google in the right direction. If that make sense. It did have any impact with the site we tested, but I would be really interested in seeing what happens with the UK/Irish pages, as I’m presuming they are both in English? Might also help avoid duplicate content issues in this case?
Google says that “setting a geographic target won’t impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country” (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399&hl=en).
As all of our pages are in English we couldn’t use it the same way, but we hope it’s the right way to geo-target sections of our .com site anyway. We might do it for other countries (non English speaking) as well, but the traffic from there is far less relevant for us than from the UK and Ireland.
In the nicest possible way (to Google) I wouldn’t believe everything they say. For example SEOs have known for years that Meta Keyword tag is ignored as a rankin factor, Google just confirmed that this year.
Of course it won’t neccesarly increase your rankings in the relevant engine (i.e google.co.uk google.de etc), but for making sure Google knows that you for example want yoursite.com/de pages to be ranked in google.de and not .co.uk it helps.
To be honest I wouldn’t have bothered doing all the work if it only helped when users ticked the “only pages from the uk” option. I bet you those options will dissapear soon anyway.
The fact is that the engines (and maybe particularly Google) are NOT very good at geo targeting and knowing which pages should be ranked in which index. Heck look at all US targeted .com websites ranking highly in google.co.uk BUT they are working hard to become better at this. Obviously owning the relevant country TLD I think is the best sign to country targeting but as I explained in my blogpost (and also you guys are experiencing) that isn’t always possible.
If you geninuly belive that it will only help your pages being indexed if people tick the “pages from the Uk only” I don’t see why you would even bother testing it. What exactly are you looking to achieve?
You could go one step further and load the sitemap dynamically if this is for different search engines. You can also do it based on the language of the users browser or operating system.
Hi Derek, Lisa,
I would expect that it will have an effect on the regular Google.ie and Google.co.uk search results also, which will be an added positive side effect of the test.
The reason we’re doing the test at all is to see if it works and to share the knowledge we gain from it. It took a couple of minutes to set up and may have a positive effect on traffic which is reason enough in itself to try it out.
Hopefully once it has been run and all the data is available we’ll be able to discuss what Google says and what Google does with some data to back us up!
[...] you remember our experiment to split our sitemaps for geo-targeted SEO? Ten weeks ago we implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target the UK and Ireland sections of our [...]